This year may see the extinction of a word, like the last elephant in the Knysna forests of South Africa. The word is might. ‘If they had been wearing lifejackets,’ the radio reporter says, ‘their lives may have been saved.’ But they weren’t and they weren’t, so in our book it should have been: ‘Their lives might have been saved.’
In trying to explain the reason why, people often get into an awful tangle with ‘succession of tenses’. That is not the only problem, as may be seen in glorious detail from the article on the word may in the Oxford English Dictionary, which has just this month been revised. It now runs to 17,500 words.
Objection to the misuse of might and may is not new. The OED gives an amusing example from 1788 by Charles Coote.
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